Weekly College Madness Links

Poison Ivy (The Economist, Sept. 21, 2006)
In a review of Daniel Golden's book, "The Price of Admission:How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates," the British magazine The Economist challenges the notion that American universities are engines of social justice, thronging with "diversity." On the contrary, elite universities do everything in their power to admit the children of privilege. Two groups of people overwhelmingly bear the burden of these policies -- Asian-Americans and poor whites.

Harvard Committee Recommends Returning Religion to Curriculum (CNN.com, October 4, 2006)
Harvard University, founded 370 years ago to train Puritan ministers, should again require all undergraduates to study religion, along with U.S. history and ethics, a faculty committee is recommending.

Deconstructing Harvard's Admissions Policy Change
A posting on a Williams College blog argues that in eliminating its early admissions program, Harvard is not just, or even primarily, interesting in improving its own policies. Rather, it wants to change the very structure of elite college admissions. Ending early admissions, however, will not necessarily make the process less pressured for applicants, as Harvard claims.

Oxbridge Closes on Harvard in Rankings (Times Educational Supplement, Oct. 5, 2006)
The Times Higher Education Supplement has published the 2006 world university rankings. American and British universities made up nearly half of the top 100 universities. The rankings were compiled by asking 3,703 academics worldwide to name the 30 best universities for research in their field of expertise, and also considering responses from 736 graduate employers globally, the ratio of faculty to students, and the university's ability to draw foreign students and world-renowned academics. The results were then weighted and transformed into a scale giving the top university a score of 100, with all subsequent institutions scoring a proportion of that score.

Below are the top 25 universities:

1) Harvard University (United States)
2) University of Cambridge (Britain)
3) University of Oxford (Britain)
4=) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States)
4=) Yale University (United States)
6) Stanford University (United States)
7) California Institute of Technology (United States)
8) University of California at Berkeley (United States)
9) Imperial College London (Britain)
10) Princeton University (United States)
11) University of Chicago (United States)
12) Columbia University (United States)
13) Duke University (United States)
14) Beijing University (China)
15) Cornell University (United States)
16) Australian National University (Australia)
17) London School of Economics (Britain)
18) Ecole Normale Superieure (France)
19) National University of Singapore (Singapore)
19) University of Tokyo (Japan)
21) McGill University (Canada)
22) University of Melbourne (Australia)
23) Johns Hopkins University (United States)
24) Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Switzerland)
25) University College London (United Kingdom)